One of the reasons the growth in broadband use in the West has been so trouble-free has been that spare network capacity, paid for by the foolish investors in the late 1990s, was sitting there for us all to use once we got our high-speed home connections. But now there are signs that we’ve used up our inheritance, pawned the last of the family silver and run down the estate by not looking to the future. More people are online than ever before, and many of us are as profligate in our use of bandwidth as a decadent aristocrat who can’t believe that the peasants will ever revolt.

A programme to kick-start the use of internet communications in space has been announced by the US government. The Department of Defense’s Iris project will put an internet router in space by the start of 2009.